Press: DPLA Midwest Coverage Highlights

“The first day of meetings were participatory workshops where a wide group of interested parties moved between three topic areas: Content Infrastructure and the Digital Hubs Pilot Program, Technical Development, and The Future of the DPLA. These sessions provided important feedback to the DPLA leadership group on focusing forward direction for the DPLA.”

“The day started with a welcome from John Palfrey, who reported that through the livestream and mailing lists there were over a thousand active participants in the process. The project seemed two years ago (and still does) seem to him “completely ambitious and almost crazy,” but actually is working out. He emphasized that everything is still “wet clay” and a participatory process, but everything is headed to April 2013 for the public launch with initial version of the service and a fair amount of content being available. We will come back a bit later to exactly what that content is and from what sources it will come.”

“Some might look at DPLA and say “we have enough stuff, this is just more of the same. There is nothing new here.” But that is not the case. The killer aspect of the DPLA is community. The success of the DPLA is tied not only to technical infrastructure or the use of the platform and content, but to the strength of the community that contributes to the code and carries the conversation.

“Although he is focusing on our brick and mortar libraries, these ideas resonate with the current development work surrounding the DPLA. The DPLA strives to be much more than a technical platform and deep resource of digital content. It strives to be a platform for social innovation of, by, and for the greater library, archive, museum communities and the communities they serve.”

“As I put it on Twitter, one can think of this initial set of materials (beyond the millions of metadata records from universities) as content from local ponds—small libraries, archives, museums, and historic sites—sent through streams to lakes—state digital libraries, which already exist in 40 states (a surprise to many, I suspect)—and then through rivers to the ocean—the DPLA. The DPLA will run a sophisticated technical infrastructure that will support manifold uses of this aggregation of aggregations.”

“Although the DPLA must launch its active prototype within the next six months, those on the steering committee remain optimistic of the trial’s success. “Based on the impressive progress, things have never seemed more promising or more probable,” said Doron Weber, vice chair of the steering committee and vice president of programs at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a contributor. “This is a big, bold idea for the digital age, and we are on the verge of an historic transformation.”

DPLA has filed paperwork to become a 501(c)(3), and we hope that in the next few months it will gain its nonprofit status. We will be hiring an executive director to run the new organization. So the big thing in terms of governance is the transition to an independent organization. The people at the Berkman Center, and members of the DPLA secretariat and initial steering committee, have laid the groundwork. Part of the mission and vision is to create this independent organization and to hire staff and move the organization forward. The people at Berkman will go back to work on other projects but remain involved in the board and committees in other ways. I’m looking toward to being the first employee of the new independent organization and helping to build a small core staff.

On the content side of things we will continue to work on the digital hubs pilot for the next two years. At the same time we will be developing strategies and infrastructure to enable other types of hubs or content aggregators to contribute content to the DPLA. Obviously DPLA can’t have one-to-one relationships with everyone in the country that has digital content—that would be very laborious and hard to maintain with a very small staff. So the goal is to build aggregators, working off of the service and content hub model, and expand participation.”